Why do you use musical instrument digital interace?

Answer 1

The Musical Instrument Digital Interface (commonly called MIDI) has been around for a couple of decades. It was designed to allow electronic keyboard instruments to control electronic "voice boxes" through a wire-connection. As the technology matured, electronic keyboards became schizophrenic: a keyboard controller and a full synthesizer in the same case. That means that you can have multiple keyboard instruments and play and control them all through the keyboard and controls of just one of them. Or, use an eighth keyboard to control the sounds of the other seven. This led to the production of sound devices like samplers (digital sample players) without keyboards at all, meant to be stacked and racked and connected to keyboard controllers (with no built-in voices at all).

Some efforts have been made, with varying success, to make "non-traditional controllers, like wind/brass/guitar controllers. These are usually voiceless, and use MIDI to connect to sound boxes.

Likewise, with MIDI interfaces available for computers, the computer can control voice boxes, or be controlled by external controllers, allowing for automatic music input to notation editors and sequencer/mixer programs, and using the computer as a MIDI-controlled synthesizer.